Mobile media in LeMill

I decided to write a proper user story explaining how mobile media can be used with LeMill.

John is a LeMill user. He gets a new phone with Internet connection (wlan, 3G, etc), video camera and a great audio recorder. He finds that you can add you media to the LeMill with special mobile phone software called LeMidlet. He downloads and installs the software in his phone.

Next day when jogging he sees some interesting birds taking off in a forest lake. He thinks that this would be a great shot to the biology learning resource he is working on in LeMIll.

He takes his phone, opens LeMidlet in his phone (this is a tricky thing) and starts to shoot video. When done he adds metadata and uploads the video to LeMill. He is happy, puts his phone back in his pocket, forgets the issue then and continues running in the woods.

Next time when working with LeMill he looks for the media piece and finds out that it is in the database, but next to it there is a text:

“This is mobile media pieces uploaded by John. We do not support the file type and recommend you to download and encode it to file type supported by LeMill. We support M3 audio and Flashmovies”.

John is not sure what to do with the file and he sends a message to his friend Hans who seems to know a lot about this kind of things.

Hans downloads the media piece in his PC, open the file with some software, encodes it and uploads it back to LeMill. Now everybody can use it.

John gets Hans a new tie for Christmas.

Change History

The users of LeMill are teachers, who don't know what is MP3 or flash movies (as Teemu writed), but I think users would like to use the materials what they created by mobile phones. For this reason I think we would give some automatic conversion feature for this materials. I know that it is a little bit problematic, but I think users need this feature. Szabi suggested a possible solution. LeMill should run a background thread, which convert materials in free server time (I think a webserver should have many free unused time). When the user upload things LeMill could store them in the native format, keep these in draft state, and if the user want to use it, it shows the text: "You cannot use this media piece until the server convert it." After the conversion, the media piece becomes a simple useable media piece, and the user could use it normally.